Velupillai Prabhakaran

Velupillai Prabhakaran (26 November 1954-18 May 2009) was the founder and leader of the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE), a terrorist group that sought to secede from Sri Lanka and create a state for Tamils on the northern and eastern parts of the island. He was killed in 2009 in a rocket attack by the Sri Lankan Army as they crushed the LTTE.

Biography
Velupillai Prabhakaran was born on 26 November 1954 in Valvettithurai, Dominion of Ceylon, United Kingdom (present-day Sri Lanka) to a family of Hindu Tamils. Prabhakaran was angered by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority's discrimination against Hindu Tamils, and he formed the Tamil Tigers rebel group in 1976 so that the Tamils could have their own land. He was responsible for the assassination of Alfred Duraiappah, the Protestant Tamil mayor of Jaffna, accusing him of being a collaborator with the government against the Tamils. On 23 July 1983 the Sri Lankan Civil War broke out between his Tamil Tigers and the government, leading to over 25 years of armed conflict on the island of Sri Lanka between his rebels and the government. His forces used Russian, Chinese, and American weapons and were so powerful that they managed to have their own air force and an army of suicide bombers. He knew that peaceful protests would be crushed and never heard, so he resorted to militarism.

Prabhakaran was known as a terrorist mastermind, using suicide bombers to carry out terrorist attacks against the Buddhist Sinhalese population as well as ordering his fighters to take no prisoners while attacking enemies. In 1991 the LTTE assassinated President Rajiv Gandhi of India in Tamil Nadu in response to his deployment of the Indian Army against the LTTE in Sri Lanka in hopes of preventing Tamils from rising up in India, and in 1993 they killed President Ranasinghe Premadasa of Sri Lanka in a suicide bombing. On 18 May 2009 Prabhakaran was finally tracked down as the Sri Lankan Army launched successful offensives that drove the LTTE into defeat. He was killed in a rocket attack while trying to flee the combat zone, with his body floating among the mangroves until a soldier found him and confirmed his death.